About
SoTranscribe is the first product of SoTranscribe GmbH (in Gründung), a Vienna-based startup spun out of idea2.life within the EvoBioSys network. We’re building it because we needed it ourselves — and the existing options either send your audio to U.S. clouds or expect you to be a Linux engineer.
Projektleiterin · Co-founder · Commercial Lead
Strategic communications professional based between New York and Vienna. Previously at Edelman Smithfield, where she led communications strategy for clients in finance and technology. Cornell University graduate. Brings the go-to-market, partnerships, and commercial discipline. Co-Geschäftsführerin of SoTranscribe GmbH.
Technical Co-Lead · Co-founder
Vienna-based technologist building EvoBioSys, an evolutionary-biosystems framework for sovereign technology. Background in knowledge infrastructure, distributed systems, and AI integration. Owner of multiple production sovereignty stacks (memory systems, publication pipelines, holonic project tooling). Builds the SoTranscribe pipeline (Whisper Large v3, pyannote, Rust + React), runs the technical side, and stewards the open-source release.
Audio of meetings, voice memos, and conversations is some of the most sensitive content a person creates. Most transcription services live in U.S. clouds and are reachable under the U.S. CLOUD Act — even when the data is “stored in Europe.” SoTranscribe gives people a practical alternative: open-source software they can self-host, or a hosted tier we run on servers we colocate in Austria.
We host in Austria because in 2026 it offers materially stronger surveillance protections than Switzerland. Austrian § 134 / 135a StPO requires an individual court order before any provider can be compelled to release content data; bulk requests are not legally available. The Austrian Verfassungsgerichtshof struck down general data retention as unconstitutional in 2014. Austria is EU and GDPR-aligned — one stable, well-tested legal regime.
We are not hosting in Switzerland. The pending VÜPF revision (Article 50a) would mandate provider-side decryption, trigger 6-month IP-log retention at as few as 5,000 users, and impose government-ID identification — implemented by Federal Council ordinance, bypassing parliament. Proton, the Swiss privacy flagship, is publicly relocating infrastructure out of Switzerland into the EU. We build directly in Austria.
2026 — SoTranscribe GmbH (in Gründung) founded as the first product spinout of idea2.life.
idea2.life — an incubator with a turquoise (Spiral Dynamics tier-2) sovereign-by-default worldview. SoTranscribe is its first baby.
EvoBioSys — the broader network: a constellation of projects applying evolutionary-biosystems thinking to technology and society.
Sovereign Switch — the umbrella initiative making digital sovereignty practical for non-techies. SoTranscribe is the first concrete product in that family.
SoTranscribe GmbH is bootstrapping with a combination of founder capital and project funding from European public innovation programs (application in process). The hosted tier’s revenue model is transparent: tiered pricing, EU payment rails (Mollie, Lago, GoCardless — no Stripe), public ledger via Open Collective Europe for sponsors.
We won’t use Stripe, Google Analytics, Google Fonts, or any U.S. payment processor. We won’t train models on customer audio. We won’t add tracking. We won’t make the source closed. We won’t hide where data goes — every provider in the chain is named publicly on our privacy page.
Join the beta waitlist, or self-host from the source repository. For partnerships, press, or organisational use, mail connect@sotranscribe.com.